Everything at once everywhere. This 2023, the video game is not satisfied only with being the cultural industry with the highest volume of business, it also wants to invade the rest of artistic manifestations. A few days after its release, Super Mario Bros.: The Movie has already broken all box office records for an animated film. A little earlier, the television adaptation of The Last of Us had risen as HBO’s biggest hit. And as if that weren’t enough, Gabrielle Zevin’s novel Tomorrow and Tomorrow and Tomorrow – in which video games play a key role – continues to be a phenomenon among “Generation Z”.
It is not a coincidence. The study “2023 Digital Media Trends” by the consultancy Deloitte points out that video games have surpassed television and are now the main form of entertainment, especially among the youngest. It is a surprise that was to be expected, but it is nonetheless surprising how the interactive medium is also taking over the fictions of the rest of the formats.
The Super Mario Bros. movie is not only the highest grossing so far this year, it has also become the animated film with the best numbers in its first two weeks. Nintendo’s plumber has surpassed the record held by the heroines of Frozen 2 in this same period and already accumulates 700 million dollars in revenue.
The Universal Pictures film is more than likely to top $1 billion, but it still has a ways to go if it wants to claim to be the highest-grossing animated film of all time. To do so, it will have to exceed the 1,657 million dollars that the remake of The Lion King (2019) by Jon Favreau got. Whether it succeeds or not, it is clear that this film is just the beginning of a whole cinematic universe and that we will have Nintendo in theaters for a long time.
Other mushrooms, but much more evil than those of Super Mario, are the ones that populate the apocalyptic world of The Last of Us. HBO Max’s adaptation of the acclaimed PlayStation game premiered earlier this year and has dominated the conversation in the competitive world of series ever since. The third episode had not yet been released when the video-on-demand platform announced the second season.
The series directed by Craig Mazin (Chernobyl) and Neil Druckmann (one of the game’s directors) gathered 4.7 million viewers in its pilot episode only in the United States and since then it has not stopped rising. The last episode, released last March, reached an audience of 8.2 million viewers in this country. In fact, as collected by Variety, The Last of Us has become the most watched series in Europe and Latin America in the history of HBO Max.
Although the adaptations of Super Mario Bros. and The Last of Us resemble a chestnut like an egg, the truth is that they share a common denominator, and that is that both have helped sales of both video games have multiplied. In the UK at least, sales of Mario Kart 8: Deluxe, Super Mario Odyssey and New Super Mario Bros U Deluxe have skyrocketed since the film’s release, pushing these three titles back into the top ten.
Likewise, the successful series premiere of The Last of Us has skyrocketed sales of the original game. According to the specialized media GamesIndustry, sales in the United Kingdom of The Last of Us Part 1 for PlayStation 5 increased by 238% the week of the premiere on HBO Max. And the same happened with the version of the game for PlayStation 4, which saw its sales increase by 322%.
Historically, the leap from successful video games to movies or television has not always had such successful results, but in recent years a very positive trend has been observed in this regard. The Witcher or Cyberpunk 2077 series or the two Sonic movies are good examples.
However, not all the influence of the video game on other means of expression is linked to specific franchises and with such a commercial spirit. In the summer of 2022, the American writer Gabrielle Zevin published her novel Mañana, mañana y mañana (Alianza Editorial; published in Spain in February 2023). This story starring two gifted young video game creators is full of references to the interactive medium and since it was put on sale it has been a literary phenomenon all over the world.
Chosen by Time magazine as the best fiction novel of 2022 and with Paramount already working to bring it to the big screen, Tomorrow, Tomorrow and Tomorrow is another good example of how video games are making their way beyond their own borders.
For an entire generation that is now between its twenties and forties, and that has grown up at the same time as the world of electronic entertainment, it is something very natural to see how the characters jump beyond the console or computer screen. In 2023 video games dominate cinema, television and novels, and it does not seem to be a passing phenomenon.